National Bottle Bill

[Hoplite]

Currently, there are 11 states in the US that have bottle bills. Bottle bills are a small surcharge levied on a bottled product when it's bought that can be redeemed when the product is recycled. The unclaimed deposits are used to fund recycling drop-off points and other recycling programs.

These laws have been very successful in the states where they exist currently and I'm somewhat curious why we dont institute this on a NATIONAL level? In addition to providing revenue, we increase the return rate of recyclable materials and help slow some of the environmental damage that the proliferation of perfectly recyclable materials is causing.

A bonus is this program has a very low actual budgetary impact. Even if 100% of all redeemable material is returned, the government is out almost nothing. Additionally, you have to consider what kind of money and resources would be saved with a massive upturn of recycling.

What do you think?

 

[Deuce]

Well, I know how some of the anti-liberals will react

I lived in New York for a while and the bottle deposit thing did seem fairly effective there. I'd have to see some numbers on it to really have much of an opinion.

 

[MaggieD]

Currently, there are 11 states in the US that have bottle bills. Bottle bills are a small surcharge levied on a bottled product when it's bought that can be redeemed when the product is recycled. The unclaimed deposits are used to fund recycling drop-off points and other recycling programs.

These laws have been very successful in the states where they exist currently and I'm somewhat curious why we dont institute this on a NATIONAL level? In addition to providing revenue, we increase the return rate of recyclable materials and help slow some of the environmental damage that the proliferation of perfectly recyclable materials is causing.

A bonus is this program has a very low actual budgetary impact. Even if 100% of all redeemable material is returned, the government is out almost nothing. Additionally, you have to consider what kind of money and resources would be saved with a massive upturn of recycling.

What do you think?

I am sooo in favor f deposits on bottles, plastic as well as glass. Bottled water alone accounts for the largest single-item sales number of the country (probably the world, when ya' think about it). $16 Billion 2008 statistic! Imagine all the bottles!

We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.)

Probably the vast majority of the bottles end up in landfills to take a hundred years to decompose.

In 1976, the average American drank 1.6 gallons of bottled water a year, according to Beverage Marketing Corp. Last year, we each drank 28.3 gallons of bottled water--18 half-liter bottles a month. We drink more bottled water than milk, or coffee, or beer. Only carbonated soft drinks are more popular than bottled water, at 52.9 gallons annually.

The more I read about this, the more nutz I'm convinced we really are.

Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.

(Fiji Water actually comes from Fiji, BTW.)

OMG!

Our recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year--more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

Can you tell that I feel strongly about this? Message in a Bottle - Bottled Water - Luxury Water - Mineral Water | Fast Company

These are just stats on water bottles; soda? Twice the volume.

If our country is serious about being GREEN!!!! how could we NOT put deposits on every single bottle sold? Whew. Think I'll take a nap.